Guys,
I have my Roomba connected to ST via IFTTT - works a treat. When the Housemode goes to “away” it triggers both a simulated switch for actiontiles and manual access aswell as the webhook to start roomba. I want to improve that piston by adding some kind of a daily counter that sums up all roomba-minutes resulting from several short “aways” until one full hour is reached and THEN not start another roomba cycle with the next “away”… Any suggestions how to do that? me is too dumb

You could set a local variable and reset it at midnight. Are you trying to count the number of times that you are away or the number of minutes that you’re away? The roomba doesn’t “go-home” when your ST goes back into home mode does it? It finished it’s cycle?

Hmmm…but when it restarts does it pick up where it left off? Or does it start at the beginning again? Because it it’s at the beginning it you wouldn’t want to total them up. Also, if the logic is that smart, I would think they would have a function where you told the Roomba when it was allowed to clean, and it kept track of whether it was done for the day or not and then you wouldn’t have to figure this out. I don’t have one so I can’t really look at the IFTTT integration. Are you 100% sure it’s not doing this for you already? Because the roomba doesn’t always take the same amount of time to clean the same area. Depending on how dirty an area is, it might have to pass over that area several time. Also, depending on if any furniture in the area has moved, it’s movement patterns within the space will change so it will take more/less time to clean the same area. The AI built into these little vacuums is actually really amazing. For the connected version, I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have a feature like what you are looking for baked in ahead of time.

I actually just took a look at the IFTTT integration and I think your solution is a lot easier than you think. The roomba also has a trigger called “Mission Complete”. So, what I would suggest is that you create a variable to be updated by a webhooks call or a virtual switch in ST and update the variable or switch when the roomba triggers it’s “Mission Complete”. That way, when you leave, you would only send the “Start Roomba” action if “Mission Complete” hasn’t been done yet.